SEO
9 SaaS-marknadsföringsstrategier för hållbar tillväxt
Sustainable growth for a SaaS company is about creating long-term value that is a) profitable and b) able to be maintained over time without compromising the brand’s reputation. In other words, by building growth, you’re building a foundation for more growth as you go.
We’ll talk about nine marketing strategies that are perfect for achieving and maintaining sustainable growth.
Product-market fit (PMF) is when a business has confirmed signals that its product can satisfy an existing demand in a market with high potential.
The usual sign of achieving PMF is when people are willing to buy the product (even if it’s not perfect yet), actively use it, and recommend it to others.
This is a sustainable strategy because it allows you to make sure you’re building something meaningful that will actually get paying users.
PMF automatically makes your messaging more effective. You’re promoting a product people want. And you already know who you’re talking to, so your marketing dollars are better spent.
Conversely, if none of your marketing efforts seem to work, the problem may be the product and not how creative or well funded your campaigns are.
You can find SaaS companies with product-market fit all around. These will be companies that still offer the same kind of products that made them profitable: Slack, Atlassian, Shopify, etc.
How it works
The general idea is to ship a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and iterate on it based on real user input until you see that people actively use it and recommend it.
There are five steps in the process:
- Formulate the value hypothesis: Why is a customer likely to buy your product?
- Specify the features of your MVP: The right quantity and quality of features needed to verify the value hypothesis.
- Build your MVP: There are many ways to present your product to your audience; you don’t necessarily need to develop a fully functional product.
- Test the MVP with real users: In other words, get feedback.
- Learn from your users and iterate: Some ideas will need more work, while some are probably destined to fail. Gather your data and make the decision.
When you achieve PMF, it will be time to scale your company and marketing efforts.
This strategy doesn’t need an introduction. We’ve all used product trials and free tools. That said, this strategy can be looked at from different angles. What’s important from a marketing perspective are these three benefits:
- Reduced friction – This means there are fewer objections to trying your product.
- Time to experience the value of the product and get hooked – Reading about a product on a landing page is not the same as experiencing it. Your potential customers will likely expect the possibility to put their hands on the product before they buy.
- Direct marketing channel – You can ask users to sign up for a newsletter or send them messages concerning the product.
For instance, HubSpot carves out parts of the platform for free usage (e.g., CRM, CMS). It does this, as it explains, to increase the force of its marketing flywheel. Or in other words, to propel its entire business model.
How it works
Start by weighing the pros and cons of free and freemium products.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Less friction with getting people to use your product. | Harder to manage expectations. People may expect to get more things for free. |
| Bigger user base. | More server load and possibly more queries to support. |
| Works well with growth loops (more on that later). | Offering something for free may reduce its perceived value. |
| Direct marketing channel to signed-up users (content distribution and upselling). | |
| More feedback. |
Getting users in front of free products is only part of the job. The harder part is getting them to upgrade.
First off, you need to set the right expectations—you won’t convert all of them. For the ones that are “convertible,” here are some tactics you can use:
- Never stop improving customer satisfaction. What your product does and how it does it is absolutely fundamental.
- Educate users about the product. Use blog posts, videos, or quick in-app tips.
- Offer limited access to all newly developed features. For instance, you can allow everyone to use each new feature for five days for free.
- Provide excellent customer service.
- Offer flexible payment options.
When looking for ideas for free products that will generate traffic, try a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Sökordsutforskaren. You can:
- Enter features of your product.
- Gå till Matchande termer report.
- Använd Omfatta filter with keyword modifiers pointing to tools, for example: “tool, check, checker, finder, analyzer, builder, free.” Set to “Any word.”
To illustrate, our free website traffic checker tool generates an estimated 33.4K organic visits each month from ranking for keywords like “website traffic checker” or even “website traffic.”
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing content to attract and retain customers.
If you add search engine optimization to the equation, you get a framework for creating content relevant to your business och the reader. You also get a built-in distribution engine that generates almost free traffic.
SEO is one of the most sustainable marketing strategies because it generates passive traffic that accumulates over time and can generate traffic even years after. To put it differently, SEO results are continuous—and you don’t get that with all marketing strategies.
Our blog is an example of such a strategy. It brings an estimated 628K organic visits each month, worth around $860K in ad money, through regular publishing of SEO content.
How it works
SEO is generally worth it if at least one of these is true:
- People are searching for what you sell or do.
- People are searching for solutions to problems your business helps to solve.
- You can give a better solution than the conventional one people are searching for.
In any case, the core of this strategy is to find relevant keywords with traffic potential. The right keywords can connect you with your target audience and create an opportunity to pitch your product. And if you’re not ranking for these keywords, your competitors will.
The process of finding the right keywords for your website is called sökordsforskning. Here’s a quick rundown:
- Go to Sökordsutforskaren
- Enter industry-related seed keywords, e.g., “seo, digital marketing, keyword, backlink”
- See keyword ideas in the Matchande termer Rapportera
- Use the filters to refine results if needed (e.g., look only for low-competition keywords or keywords with a certain minimum traffic potential)
Other elements of the SEO process are building a sound technical foundation, creating optimized content, and building links. You can learn how to start with the entire process in our nybörjarguide till SEO.
A user community can help your SaaS product in a number of ways:
- It helps to make the product better through feedback.
- It helps to spread word of mouth about the product even if the community is exclusive.
- It offers added value to the user—they can learn from others in the community and network.
Building a user community is a sustainable strategy because it leverages existing customers and can help facilitate long-term engagement with the product.
A famous example of a community with a price tag on it is Behance, acquired by Adobe for $150M. It generates over 10M search visits each month and allows the parent company to bring the design community very close to its product.
How it works
In a nutshell: create a place where people can meet online, build a constant presence there, and animate the community (feature launches, discussions, polls, etc.).
For example, at Ahrefs, we offer access to our exclusive community, Ahrefs Insider, with every subscription. All we needed to start it was a regular community feature on Facebook. Now it gathers a total of 17K registered users.
Earned media is publicity gained organically from promotional efforts, like press coverage, social media mentions, and search engine rankings.
Earned media is a sustainable form of marketing for these reasons:
- It’s cheaper in the long run compared to advertising (sometimes even free).
- It’s long lasting.
- It earns your brand awareness and credibility.
Here’s an example that checks all three boxes. A while ago, we published a data study showing that 90.63% of content gets no traffic from Google. This article was mentioned by multiple reputable websites, including NY Times, Forbes, and main SEO blogs. All of that coverage gave us free brand exposure and backlinks.
How it works
Earned traffic covers a wide range of marketing tactics, so there’s no silver bullet here. Besides SEO content, which we already touched on, the tactics that are repeatable and will probably have the most impact over time are:
When vetting which site to pitch your product, story, or quote to, you can use Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar. For instance, say you’re looking for websites that review SaaS products like yours. Just search for your competitors’ reviews in Google and look at the metrics to see which sites can send you stronger links and considerable traffic.
Multi-channel marketing is basically about interacting with your audience using different marketing channels: social media, search, podcasts, email, etc.
Using multi-channel marketing will have the following advantages:
- A broader reach.
- Channels can work to support each other. For example, social media can help you to get links to websites and boost your SEO.
- You create convenience for your audience to interact with the brand.
- There’s less risk, thanks to diversification.
The idea behind this strategy is that your audience is likely scattered across various websites and social media platforms. So even if one marketing channel works exceptionally well, you probably shouldn’t drop all other channels.
How it works
Here are some ideas on how to find the best marketing channels for your business:
- You can see where your competitors promote.
- Do keyword research to estimate organic traffic for relevant keywords (we discussed it in point #3).
- Use audience research tools like SparkToro. Below, you can see a screenshot showing what kind of data about your audience the tool can provide.
Furthermore, using multiple marketing channels allows you to distribute content more effectively. You can:
- Repurpose content into other formats and platforms.
- Build an audience to distribute content directly (for example, grow your email list).
- Promote the content via ads or sponsored newsletters.
- Syndicate articles to other websites.
Here’s an example. Our thoughts on using ChatGPT for SEO were used in a YouTube-video, on our blogg, and on social media. While there may be some overlap between these audiences, they are definitely not identical. So by using the multi-channel approach, we were able to get more eyes on our content.
A growth loop is a system where new user input creates an output that drives product demand.
To illustrate, here’s how Notion used a product feature to activate and retain users (courtesy of Foundation).
Growth loops are a stellar example of a sustainable marketing strategy because the whole model creates a loop. The more you grow, the more users you get, and so the more you grow.
Furthermore, this strategy gives your marketing budget more “power” since each dollar invested in acquiring a user is also invested in the users generated via the loop.
How it works
The simplest (but super effective) form of a growth loop is making your product outstanding. When your customers love the product and recommend it to others, you start growing on word of mouth—you acquire users you spent nothing to get.
In some types of products, it’s possible to go beyond word of mouth and create a typical growth loop. It all depends on your product and your creativity. Here are a couple of levers you can pull:
- Make it easier for users to share their work publicly like Adobe with Behance
- Devise a referral program like Dropbox
- Create a marketplace for apps like Atlassian or WordPress
- Release an API like OpenAI
- Encourage user-generated content like G2
- Allow for free product usage after creating a free account like Figma or Loom
- Allow users to invite others to their workspaces like Slack or Miro
Revenue expansion is the additional revenue you get from your existing customers through upselling, cross-selling, and add-ons.
It’s a strategy that has proven to work for decades in multiple industries. For instance, this is why when you order a regular pizza, you’re offered to get a bigger one, get a drink with it, or add some extra ingredients.
And here’s an example from the SaaS world. When subscribing to HubSpot, you’re offered to upgrade by increasing the limit of contacts and also to purchase add-ons.
According to a correlation study published by ProfitWell, SaaS subscription-based companies should aim for 20% to 30% expansion revenue in their overall revenue in order to succeed.
You’ve probably heard that it’s better to retain a customer than to get a new one. That old business adage still holds true. According to this 2016 survey, SaaS companies spend an average of $1.16 to earn $1 on new annual contract value but only $0.27 on upsells and $0.20 on plan expansions.
How it works
If you offer additional value to your satisfied customers, there’s a good chance those customers will be happy to buy more from you. Here are some ideas for creating value for revenue expansion:
- Offer premium features on higher plans
- Offer a per-seat model to cater to both small and large companies
- Add a custom/enterprise tier for the most demanding customers
- Offer priority support
For example, when design tool UXPin developed a way to design with production-ready components, it decided to offer that as a premium version of the product with an almost 80% higher price tag than the UXPin Standard version.
But how to know when and if your customers are willing to expand? Here are some signals:
- Customers often reach their usage limit.
- Customers express interest in additional features or higher tiers.
- Your competitors offer a successful expansion system.
- You’ve got an awesome idea for a premium feature.
Growth marketing is the process of increasing a company’s revenue by applying an experiment-driven and integrated approach to all stages of attracting customers.
To understand this type of marketing better, let’s compare it to traditional marketing and growth hacking (the close variant I don’t recommend).
While the obvious solution for more sales is getting more visitors, this is not always the best one. If the product lacks competitive features and if there are obstacles on the path to purchase, money spent on getting more people through the door will always lead to low conversion and high churn. This is where growth marketing comes in.
A great example of growth-oriented thinking is LinkedIn’s Reconnect Flow. It’s a nickname for the early onboarding process where new users were asked questions about their personal experiences and offered connections to existing LinkedIn users based on that. This simple tactic engaged both new and old users.
Another interesting growth tactic LinkedIn used in the early days was encouraging users to import their email contacts (not a common thing back then). It was enough for 7% of new users to import their contacts to increase the overall number of invitations to 30%.
How it works
The idea behind growth marketing is based on the scientific method: propose hypotheses and validate them through experimentation. In marketing, it’s known as the growth hacking cycle.
The whole cycle starts by gathering data on the köparens resa. Next is generating ideas on how to improve and then testing those ideas (for example through A/B testing).
It may seem like an obvious way to do marketing. But it’s not always that easy: Some tests may be hard to perform, and discipline is required. Also, it’s always faster (but not better) to go with your gut.
An important part of the growth mindset is the ability to analytically break down big problems into smaller pieces. This approach allows for setting more achievable goals.
For instance, a goal to increase sales is too vague because sales rely on many factors and not all of them are controllable. Instead, growth marketers may want to discover what “moves the needle.” Depending on the product, this may be encouraging the user to perform specific actions in the product or gearing pricing and communication toward a new audience.
Slutgiltiga tankar
Sustainable growth doesn’t rely only on the strategies or tactics you choose. You need to give them time to work out the returns. You also need to experiment with them to see what works best for you.
Det finns en bra föredrag av Rand Fishkin om konceptet svänghjul i marknadsföring; hur det första trycket är svårast, men det bygger fart som gör det lättare i längden. Hållbara tillväxtstrategier är precis så. När du bygger mer värde i din produkt och ditt varumärke, får du fart som fungerar som en multiplikator för varje ny sak du gör.
Har du frågor eller kommentarer? Pinga mig på Twitter eller Mastodont.
SEO
What Are SEO Benchmarks, & Which Ones Actually Matter?
To set goals and track and measure your performance in any campaign, you will need key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmarks.
But with so many KPIs, knowing exactly which ones you should be benchmarking can be challenging. In this article, we will look at which SEO benchmarks matter and why.
Many people usually talk about key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmarks interchangeably, which can be confusing, especially if you’re new to SEO. Although they do work together, they are not the same.
KPIs are industry statistics you can use to measure performance over time and give insights as to how effective your SEO campaign is.
Benchmarks, however, are KPIs you set as your reference point when building your SEO strategy.
For example, organic traffic is a KPI. But you can use last month’s organic traffic as a benchmark.
SEO benchmarks allow us to have a before and after picture for any particular KPI. This helps us to see how our SEO campaign is progressing and can help us to adjust our strategy if needed.
Benchmarks also allow us to communicate the value of our work to clients.
There are many different KPIs you can measure. And like most things in SEO, which ones you should track will depend on the type of site you’re working on and their individual goals.
However, there are several KPIs that are important for tracking the performance of Allt websites.
Let’s take a look at which KPIs everyone should be benchmarking and why they are important.
Traffic and user experience benchmarks
Driving users to your site is only part of the work.
If a site user has a bad experience, they are likely to leave the site and never return. This is why we not only want to set traffic-related benchmarks but also user experience benchmarks too.
Organic search traffic
This metric shows how many users visit your site from unpaid listings on search engines like Google and Bing. You should be tracking traffic on a monthly basis.
When setting benchmarks, generally speaking, it is advisable to use the last full month’s data and not set it any further back than this, as the goal should always be to outperform your closest benchmark.
However, if seasonality is a factor in your business, it’s advisable to use your best month in the peak season as your ongoing benchmark.
For accuracy, when it comes to organic traffic from Google, it is advisable to check Google Search Console (GSC).
There are a number of discrepancies between GSC and Google Analytics due to how they collect data. But when focusing on organic traffic from Google itself, GSC is considered more accurate.
Head over to Google Search Console and go to Performance > Search results.
In the “Performance” report, you will see four metrics. The first metric, “clicks,” is the number of people who clicked through from the Google search results to your website. This is the number we are interested in.
Below this, you can also see the number of clicks at page level.
If you want to split organic traffic by search engine, you can do this with GA4. Go to Acquisition > Traffic acquisition.
Then you can go to “All Users” and choose “First user source / medium” from the “Audience name” drop-down menu.
Then you can select the organic search channels you want to include from the “Dimension values” drop-down menu. This can be all organic traffic from multiple search engines, or you can set individual benchmarks for each search engine, like Bing or Yahoo.
With these filters applied, you will see your website’s organic traffic for the past month. If you would like to see it broken down at the page level, you can simply go to Engagement > Pages and screens.
Engaged sessions
In GA4, “Bounce rate” has essentially been replaced by “Engaged sessions.” In order for a session to be engaged, it must last longer than 10 seconds, have multiple screen or page views, or result in a conversion.
You can see the number of engaged sessions per user in Engagement > Overview.
Average engagement time
Average engagement time in GA4 is important because, generally speaking, we want users to stay on the site for a longer period of time.
Low engagement time isn’t always a bad thing. It can simply mean the visitor got what they needed fast. If you’re working with a site that monetizes content like an affiliate site, you will want your visitor to click that affiliate link as soon as possible. So take this one with a grain of salt.
However, it can sometimes be an indicator of:
- Low-quality content
- Poor user experience
Overall average engagement time is listed on the “Report snapshot” in GA4.
But you can get a detailed breakdown in Engagement > Pages and screens.
Backlink profile benchmarks
Backlinks are links from another website to a page on your website. They help Google and other search engines understand your content and how authoritative your website is.
The backlinks’ quality, quantity, relevance, authority, and anchor text are among the many ranking factors for Google.
Number of backlinks
You want the number of (quality) links to be growing at a consistent rate. You need backlinks both to rank and maintain your rankings. Benchmarking the number of backlinks your website has will help you to monitor growth as you go forward.
Med Bakåtlänkar rapport i Ahrefs Site Explorer, you can see the total number of links to your website.
You can also see the number of individual referring domains and how they are growing month over month (and compare that against competitors on the same graph).
This is an important thing to benchmark, as there is a strong positive correlation between the number of referring domains and increased organic traffic.
Domänbetyg
Ahrefs' Domain Rating (DR) is a measure of the strength of a website’s backlink profile. It shows how your website’s backlink profile compares to the others in the Ahrefs database on a 100-point scale.
The idea would be for your website’s DR to increase over time as an indication that the strength of your backlink profile is improving.
Benchmarking DR is a pretty common practice, especially among those working with clients who may not fully comprehend SEO and, in particular, link building. It’s easier to relay that DR getting higher indicates improvement.
URL Rating
Although DR correlates with Google rankings pretty well, it doesn’t do this as well as Ahrefs’ URL Rating (UR). UR is a measure of an individual page’s backlink profile on a 100-point scale.
UR considers both internal and external links and “nofollow” attributes when calculating the UR score, following the same principles as Google’s PageRank. Therefore, benchmarking UR can help you understand how well an individual page can rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
Keyword benchmarks
Nyckelord are the bread and butter of your SEO campaign. After all, you need to understand what relevant queries your potential audience is searching for in order to optimize your pages.
Individual keyword positions
Your website could naturally rank for thousands of keywords on the SERPs. However, there should be some keywords you care about more than others—likely those that are most relevant to your products or services.
Benchmarking individual keyword positions (where they rank in the search results) will allow you to track and set goals for important keywords. For example, if your website currently ranks in position #6 for “seo consultant,” you can use that as your benchmark to improve upon.
While you can monitor keywords in Google Search Console, using a rank tracking tool like Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker will allow you to track the keywords you care about most and see how you stack up against competitors. You can even get email alerts about the progress of your tracked keywords.
Keyword profile value
Although benchmarking the keyword profile value may not be relevant for everyone, I find that for anyone working with clients, it can help them to relay the value of the work they’re doing. Keyword profile value can be seen in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer as “Traffic value.”
Organic traffic value is the equivalent monthly cost of traffic from all keywords that the target website/URL ranks for if paid via PPC instead of ranking organically.
Keyword Difficulty
Ahrefs’ Keyword Difficulty (KD) is a metric that can help you determine how hard it would be to rank in the top 10 for a given keyword in a given country.
It is calculated by taking a trimmed mean of the number of linking domains to the current top 10 ranking pages and then plotting the result on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100.
KD only takes into account linking domains, but there are many other variables you will need to rank highly, like great content. However, it is a good indicator.
KD can be used as a benchmark for choosing keywords. For example, you may find that, currently, you can only rank for keywords that are considered “easy” or “medium” in terms of KD. Whereas your most important keywords may be considered “hard.”
However, the level of KD you can achieve should improve over time. That’s why KD can be an important metric to benchmark and improve upon.
Share of voice
Share of voice (SOV) takes rank tracking to another level. You can see SOV in the Översikt Rapportera in Rank Tracker.
The SOV metric shows you the percentage of all possible organic clicks (from the SERPs) for the tracked keywords landing on your website. It basically shows you how visible your brand is on the SERPs.
There is a strong positive correlation between SOV and market share. So it is an important KPI to benchmark.
By heading to the “Competitors” tab in Rank Tracker and entering the websites you consider your competition, you can compare your SOV to those sites.
Slutgiltiga tankar
Benchmarking important KPIs is one of the best ways to not only see where your website is currently at but also give you data you can improve upon. It allows you to set strategic goals and measure ongoing performance.
Har du frågor? Pinga mig på Twitter.
SEO
YouTube ändrar policy för felaktig information om val
In a significant policy shift, YouTube announced it wouldn’t remove content suggesting that fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 US Presidential and other US elections.
The company confirmed this reversal of its election integrity policy on Friday.
In this article, we’re diving deep into YouTube’s decision. What led to this point?
It’s not just YouTube, though. We’re seeing this delicate dance all around the tech world. Platforms are trying to figure out how to let people express themselves without letting misinformation run wild.
Look at this balancing act and how it’s playing out.
A Shift Towards Free Speech?
YouTube first implemented its policy against election misinformation in December 2020, once several states certified the 2020 election results.
The policy aimed to prevent the spread of misinformation that could incite violence or cause real-world harm.
However, the company is concerned that maintaining this policy may have the unintended effect of stifling political speech.
Reflecting on the impact of the policy over the past two years, which led to tens of thousands of video removals, YouTube states:
“Two years, tens of thousands of video removals, and one election cycle later, we recognized it was time to reevaluate the effects of this policy in today’s changed landscape. With that in mind, and with 2024 campaigns well underway, we will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.”
In the coming months, YouTube promises more details about its approach to the 2024 election.
Other Misinformation Policies Unchanged
While this change shifts YouTube’s approach to election-related content, it doesn’t impact other misinformation policies.
YouTube clarifies:
“The rest of our election misinformation policies remain in place, including those that disallow content aiming to mislead voters about the time, place, means, or eligibility requirements for voting; false claims that could materially discourage voting, including those disputing the validity of voting by mail; and content that encourages others to interfere with democratic processes.”
The Greater Context: Balancing Free Speech and Misinformation
This decision occurs in a broader context where media companies and tech platforms are wrestling with the balance between curbing misinformation and upholding freedom of speech.
With that in mind, there are several implications for advertisers and content creators.
Implications For Advertisers
- Brand Safety Concerns: Advertisers may be concerned about their ads appearing alongside content that spreads election misinformation.
- Increased Scrutiny: With this change, advertisers may have to scrutinize more closely where their ads are being placed.
- Potential for Boycotts: If certain brands’ advertisements are repeatedly seen on videos spreading election misinformation, it could lead to consumer boycotts.
Implications For Content Creators
- Monetization Opportunities: This could open up new monetization opportunities for content creators who focus on political content, particularly those previously penalized under the old policy.
- Increased Viewership: If their content is no longer being removed, specific creators might see an increase in viewership, leading to higher ad revenue and more engagement.
- Potential Backlash: On the flip side, content creators could face backlash from viewers who disagree with the misinformation or those who feel the platform should be taking a stronger stand against such content.
It’s important to note these are potential implications and may not be realized universally across the platform.
The impact will likely vary based on specific content, audience demographics, advertiser preferences, and other factors.
Sammanfattningsvis
YouTube’s decision showcases the ongoing struggle to balance freedom of speech and prevent misinformation.
If you’re an advertiser on the platform, remember to be vigilant about where your ads are placed.
For content creators, this change could be a double-edged sword. While it may bring more ad revenue to YouTube, there’s a risk of viewers perceiving the ads as spreading misinformation.
As participants in the digital world, we should all strive for critical thinking and fact-checking when consuming content. The responsibility to curb misinformation doesn’t rest solely with tech platforms – it’s a collective task we all share.
Källa: Youtube
Utvald bild genererad av författaren med Midjourney.
SEO
Ny e-handelsexploatering påverkar WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento
A serious hacking attack has been exploiting ecommerce websites to steal credit card information from users and to spread the attack to other websites.
These hacking attacks are called Magecart style skimmer and it’s spreading worldwide across multiple ecommerce platforms.
Attackers are targeting a variety of ecommerce platforms:
- Magento
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
- WordPress
What Does the Attack Do?
The attackers have two goals when infecting a website:
1. Use the site to spread itself to other sites
2. Steal personal information like credit card data from customers of the infected website.
Identifying a vulnerability is difficult because the code dropped on a website is encoded and sometimes masked as a Google Tag or a Facebook Pixel code.
What the code does however is target input forms for credit card information.
It also serves as an intermediary to carry out attacks on behalf of the attacker, thus covering up the true source of the attacks.
Magecart Style Skimmer
A Magecart attack is an attack that enters through an existing vulnerability on the ecommerce platform itself.
On WordPress and WooCommerce it could be a vulnerability in a theme or plugin.
On Shopify it could an existing vulnerability in that platform.
In all cases, the attackers are taking advantage of vulnerabilities that are present in the platform the ecommerce sites are using.
This is not a case where there is one single vulnerability that can be conveniently fixed. It’s a wide range of them.
The report by Akamai states:
“Before the campaign can start in earnest, the attackers will seek vulnerable websites to act as “hosts” for the malicious code that is used later on to create the web skimming attack.
…Although it is unclear how these sites are being breached, based on our recent research from similar, previous campaigns, the attackers will usually look for vulnerabilities in the targeted websites’ digital commerce platform (such as Magento, WooCommerce, WordPress, Shopify, etc.) or in vulnerable third-party services used by the website.”
Rekommenderad åtgärd
Akamai recommends that all Ecommerce users secure their websites. That means making sure all third party apps and plugins are updated and that the platform is the very latest version.
They also recommend using a Web Application Firewall (WAF), which detects and prevents intrusions when hackers are probing a site in search of a vulenerable website.
Users of platforms like WordPress have multiple security solutions, with popular and trusted ones being Sucuri Security (website hardening) and WordFence (WAF).
Akamai recommends:
“…the complexity, deployment, agility, and distribution of current web application environments — and the various methods attackers can use to install web skimmers — require more dedicated security solutions, which can provide visibility into the behavior of scripts running within the browser and offer defense against client-side attacks.
An appropriate solution must move closer to where the actual attack on the clients occurs. It should be able to successfully identify the attempted reads from sensitive input fields and the exfiltration of data (in our testing we employed Akamai Page Integrity Manager).
We recommend that these events are properly collected in order to facilitate fast and effective mitigation.”
Read the original report for more details:
New Magecart-Style Campaign Abusing Legitimate Websites to Attack Others
Google uppdaterar policycenter för shoppingannonser och policycenter för gratisannonser
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